Ann W. Harrison wrote:

> Thomas Kellerer wrote:
>
>>according to various SQL documentations the following update should
>>swap the contents of the two columns foo and bar (and it does work
>>with Postgres, Oracle, HSQLDB, SQL Server and SQL Anywhere).
>>
>>Unfortunately it does not work with Firebird (neither 1.5, nor 2.0 alpha)
>>
>>INSERT INTO foobar(foo, bar) VALUES (1,2);
>>UPDATE foobar SET foo = bar, bar = foo;
>>COMMIT;
>
>
> A known and long standing bug - one that precedes the SQL standard.
> Firebird treats the list of assignments in an update as if they
> were a sequence of assignments in a code block. The SQL standard
> treats them as if the target were one record and the source another.
> We need to fix that, but haven't.
>
> Our model is useful and defensible and a better standard (in my
> opinion) would have established old and new contexts for updates
> so both values could be referenced. However, we didn't have the
> $20K plus a person needed to be on the committee, so we didn't
> get a vote.

Where was Diane Brown when you needed her ... :-)

--
Aage J.